


Poisoning the Well

by andtheblueberrymuffins



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: ? - Freeform, Body Horror, Dark, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2019-01-09 08:36:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12272796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andtheblueberrymuffins/pseuds/andtheblueberrymuffins
Summary: Not every evening involves a struggle for the fate of the universe. Some nights offer downtime and the opportunity to get closer. Shiro and Allura enjoy a moment of peace before they have to deal with the newest oddity aboard the Castle.Or: the one where an invasive organism invades the Castle and things go very wrong, very fast.





	Poisoning the Well

Lance is the first to notice the newest oddity aboard the Castle, one evening when they’re all gathered in the kitchen, arguing with Hunk about whether or not the quiche he made is supposed to be doing what it’s doing. They’re all hungry and tired, worn out from a battle that felt like it would never end. 

Shiro does not even care about the quiche. He and Allura won’t be eating it; they had plans before the attack and he wants desperately to stick to them. The… connection between them is new, delicate, a butterfly just escaped from its chrysalis. 

All he wants is to grab their food and get out of the kitchen, to the room Allura wants to show him. He’s already supposed to be out in the hall, and he doesn’t want her to think that he’s willing to be late. 

Lance pauses in the middle of claiming that he’s never seen a quiche quiver in order to stare at the corner of the ceiling. Shiro follows his gaze after a moment, ignoring the argument anyway.

It takes Shiro a half-second, distracted as he is by thoughts of his evening, to notice the tiny movements in the shadowed corner. He frowns, pushing away from the counter, as Lance asks, to the room in general, “Hey, what’s that?”

#

_That_ is a tiny, pale, squirming thing. It looks like the root of a tree, small and delicate, something that should grow beneath the earth, never even seeing the sun.

It is strange, then, that it is growing out of the side of the Castle.

It is stranger still when it writhes, tiny filaments stretching off of its surface to anchor to the wall. “Holy shit,” Pidge says, jerking back away from it as it steadies itself. “What is—is that normal?”

“No,” Allura says, stepping through the doors to the kitchen, and she is—she is _stunning_ , wearing a flowing dress that falls off her shoulders and hangs in shimmering folds of cream around her wrists and ankles. Shiro stares at her and feels his mouth fall open. He didn’t dress up. He doesn’t have anything to dress up _in_ , but— 

Allura continues, stepping forward and scowling up at the strange thing, “It is most definitely not normal.”

The plant-thing moves once more, the filaments detaching from the wall and writhing out in empty air, towards them. It is… strange to look at. Uncomfortable. Plants shouldn’t move like that.

“Well, we’ll just pull it out, then,” Lance says, shrugging. He reaches for the thing before Shiro can recover enough to point out that might not be the best idea. A second later, Lance screams, yanking his hand back, blood dripping off of his fingers and the long spines suddenly protruding from the plant-thing.

No one says anything. No one has time to, before the spines retract back into the plant-thing, soundless, as though they never were. Lance stares at it, holding his wrist, his hand shaking, his skin covered in blood. “Hey,” Keith says, snagging a towel and grabbing for Lance’s hand, “let me see that before you get blood all over the food.”

Shiro turns to look at Allura, the back of his neck prickling; she frowns and says, “Coran, can you come down to the kitchen? I believe we might have a problem.”

#

“Well, we definitely have _something_ ,” Coran confirms, a handful of minutes later, after wandering into the kitchen and then dragging all of them to the bridge to run some scans. “See? It’s spreading in the walls around the kitchen. Slowly, though. At the rate it’s going, it must have been growing for at least a movement.”

“What is it?” Keith asks, holding a plate of Hunk’s quiche. “Some kind of plant?”

“Some kind of lifeform,” Allura says, her frown deepening by the moment. “I don’t believe we could classify it as a plant.”

“What kind of lifeform? Or, you know, better question,” Hunk says, his gaze moving from one corner of the bridge to the next, as though he’s keeping an eye out for new intrusions into their space, “where did it come from?”

“It’s hard to say,” Coran says. “We passed though that station last movement. Could be we picked something up there. Or maybe we ran into some spores around that moon the other phoeb.”

Shiro stares at the screen. The organism is barely noticeable on the scanners, just some tiny little plant-thing trying to live in part of their kitchen. It reminds him, briefly, of the grass that would struggle up between the cracks in the sidewalk back home. He shakes away the thought, his stomach rumbling.

“Look,” Lance says, smothering a yawn with his crudely bandaged hand. “It’s tiny, right? So we can worry about this tomorrow, maybe? I mean. It’s not like it’s going anywhere, and I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m beat.”

Shiro almost protests. Something strange invading the Castle should be a concern. But they spent all day in the middle of a crushing battle. And it isn’t like the thing is dangerous, except to Lance. It’s just a pest. And he just… doesn’t want to deal with it right now. He glances at Allura, and she meets his gaze, her checks flushing. That makes up his mind, more than anything else. He has other plans he’d rather attend to. He nods and says, “Yeah, it can wait until morning.”

#

“We can do this another night,” Shiro says, after they leave the bridge, once the others run off ahead. He glances sideways at Allura, stunned all over again by the dress she is wearing. He’s never seen her bare shoulders before. He wants desperately to touch the exposed skin, to trace the curve of pink towards her neck, or the soft curl of her hair, hanging past her ear.

“No,” she says, shaking her head, and then looking over at him. “Unless you’re too tired?”

“Not at all,” Shiro says. He’s not sure he _could_ be too tired for this. That eagerness must come through in his voice, because she flushes again, reaching across and touching his hand. She had not been completely sure about holding hands, when he first mentioned it, but she seems to have developed an appreciation for it. Their fingers lace together perfectly, and he has to tug her to a stop, briefly, so he can lean down, glorying in the easy way she tilts her face up and grants him a kiss.

He can count the number of times they have done this on his fingers. The newness of it still kicks him in the chest, hard and sweet.

For a moment, he contemplates forgetting dinner entirely and spending the rest of the evening simply kissing her. But her stomach rumbles, and his feels like it is not so far away from digesting itself. She draws back, her gaze lingering on his mouth, a soft glow between them, pink from the marks on her cheeks. He has not asked _why_ they glow softly after a kiss, but the confirmation that the marks on her shoulders do as well does something to the heat in his veins.

He suddenly desperately needs to know where else there are marks, if they all glow.

She says, “Come on, let’s grab the food, so I can show you the place.” All he can do is nod.

#

“I used to love coming here,” she says, leading him into a small room, one quiet and warm. It is not especially remarkable in any way, except that he cannot even hear the great ship’s engines, nor the air moving around the halls. It feels safe. Hidden. Allura is saying, “I don’t know what it was supposed to be for, but I found it and I used to come here and hide from my instructors.”

Shiro smiles, imagining her as a child, sneaking down to this quiet place while her teachers searched for her high and low. He turns, finishing his inspection of the room, and finds her sitting against one wall, pulling food out of their make-shift basket.

The soft light in the room glows off of her skin. The few loose tendrils of her hair frame her face. Her skirts pool around her legs. She’s beautiful in a way that doesn’t even feel like it should be possible.

“Shiro?” she asks, cocking her head to the side, and he shakes himself.

“Sorry,” he says, scrubbing at the back of his neck, sitting beside her. “I was—distracted.”

She ducks her head, just a little, not far enough to prevent him from seeing the pleased curve of her smile. She leans sideways, against him, and says, “I am not sure what this food is supposed to be.”

Shiro stares at it. Hunk had insisted on making it when Shiro let slip that he and Allura planned to eat dinner together, so he is sure it will be delicious. But. “Yeah, I’m not sure, either.”

Allura laughs, quietly, and he takes a bite of the soup. It is, in fact, excellent, and still warm, if not nearly so warm as his skin, everywhere Allura is touching him. He forgets entirely about the strange lifeform for the evening. It is easy, especially once they finish the food and Allura touches his jaw, turning him towards her, guiding his lips down to hers.

#

They do not stay down in the secret room for the night, though there is a moment, when Allura’s nails drag across the back of his neck, that he seriously considers that they might. But it’s—things are new, between them. New and delicate. So they gather their mess and head back to the inhabited areas of the Castle, before Shiro manages to discover any new marks.

They stroll beside one another back to the kitchen, Allura’s hand in his and the heat of her mouth still singing in his veins. The lifeform is still in the corner of the room, runners gripping to the wall once more. They lift off, after a moment, stretching outward. It must be a cycle the thing goes through. He catches Allura frowning at it. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” he asks, because there’s so much about the universe he doesn’t know.

“No,” she says and shakes her head. “But I suppose we will find out everything we need to know about it, come morning.”

“Mm,” he agrees, and she takes his hand again. He walks her to her room, since it is on the way to his, and they linger outside it for a moment, until one of his hands finds its way to the wall by her shoulder, and the other into her hair. 

She pulls back, eventually, her mouth reddened and her cheeks aglow, and says, “We should get some rest. Tomorrow promises to be busy.” 

“Alright,” he says, though his body does not feel at all ready to go to sleep. He is not in a restful state. He kisses her once more, and rocks back on his heels when she disappears into the darkness of her rooms. His body sings inside his chest, and he is—well.

An appointment with a cold shower wouldn’t go amiss. But he should check on the others before that. The sensors tell him that Keith and Lance are both in their quarters. But Pidge and Hunk are on the bridge. Shiro frowns and sighs.

He is not surprised to find them asleep, curled up at their stations. Hunk snores softly, some kind of program still running in front of him. Pidge murmurs nonsense sounds when Shiro takes off her glasses. Something is flashing on her screen, but there are no alarms going off, so he assumes it is not such an emergency that she must be woken up.

He leaves them otherwise undisturbed. If he wakes them, they will only decide that they don’t need any more sleep.

He shakes his head, and goes to find his own bed.

#

Panicked voices tear Shiro from heavy, sweet dreams. “We need everyone on the bridge!” Hunk yells over the comms, “right now!”

Shiro curses under his breath, scrubbing at his face and shoving his legs into pants, his feet into boots. He snags a shirt on the way out of the door, pulling it over his head as he goes. He’s memorized the halls, by now. He shouldn’t run into anything. So it is something of a surprise when he trips.

He catches himself, blinking at the impediment in his path. A root. Or something like a root. It stretches from one side of the hall to the other, the floor split around it. It is pulsing with white light every few seconds, the flashes moving up it. It looks very much like the strange lifeform in the kitchen, but writ large.

“Guys,” he says, dread coiling in his gut. “I don’t know how to tell you this—”

“We know!” Pidge says, “get to the bridge!”

#

Shiro finds most of the others crowded around Pidge’s station, yelling. “It was growing like, a centimeter an hour last night,” Lance snaps. “How did it end up curled around my jacket this morning?”

“I don’t know!” Pidge shouts back. “I don’t know, okay? It’s like it found a food source in the night, but I can’t figure out what it is.”

“What does it even feed on?” Keith asks, eying a tendril that is creeping its way across the room, towards the station where Coran is working. It is moving terribly fast, for something that looks like a plant.

Hunk shrugs. “Energy, we think. At least, that’s what the scans seem to indicate. But Pidge is right. It isn’t draining the Castle, as far as we can tell.”

“How far has it spread?” Shiro asks, looking at the flashing image above Pidge’s head. He can make a pretty good guess, based on the screen, but he’s hoping he’s wrong.

“It’s through most of the Castle,” Coran says, without looking up. “It has tendrils all over the ship and it seems that it tried to attach to the Lions. They’ve all moved outside of the Castle.”

“What?” Alarm flashes white hot through Shiro’s bones. If they—

“It’s alright,” Coran says, before Shiro can make a break for the hangar. “They’re still with us. They’re just… avoiding the lifeform.”

“Right,” Shiro says, taking a deep breath. They can figure this out. It’s just an overgrown creature. They’ve dealt with worse. He asks, “Have we come up with a way to deal with it, yet?”

“No. I was hoping to talk to Allura about it…” Pidge says, trailing off and looking up for the first time. She blinks, her eyes owlish behind her glasses, and asks, “Where _is_ Allura, anyway?” 

“She’s probably still sleeping,” Lance says, wiggling his eyebrows. “I bet Shiro really—”

“Stop,” Shiro says, curt. He finds the idea that she’s not up yet unlikely. Allura seems to sleep as little as he does. Maybe she’s somewhere else in the Castle, dealing with the same problem. He activates his comm and asks, “Princess? We could use your help on the bridge.”

There is no reply. Shiro frowns, because that is very unlike Allura. “Maybe she’s in the shower?” Lance suggests. “I could go—”

“Don’t,” Shiro tells him, accompanying the words with a sharp look to ensure Lance appears properly chastened, since it didn’t take the first time. “I’ll go check on her. The rest of you, keep working on… this.” He doesn’t know what to call it, exactly. An infestation? It could be some kind of attack, some new madness from Haggar.

He’s still considering classifications when he arrives at Allura’s room. He waves a hand at the controls to let her know he’s there and gets no response. He frowns and knocks, the creeping sense of dread he’s been trying to ignore intensifying. “Princess?”

Maybe she just isn’t home. But then, where is she? He tries the door again, unsurprised when it stays unresponsive to his attentions. “Pidge,” he says, “can you open the Princess’s room remotely?”

“Uh, maybe?” Pidge says. He hears her working for a moment, and then she makes a soft, satisfied sound. The door clicks and slides open a few millimeters. “There,” she says, “did that work?”

“That did it,” Shiro says, reaching for the door. “Princess?” he calls, one more time, before deciding that he has to just go for it. He slides the door open further, and it resists, enough that he has to curl his fingers around the edge and pull. “Allura?” Something snaps, giving all at once and finally granting him a look inside the room.

He cries out.

#

The plant, or whatever it is, is everywhere inside Allura’s room. Runners cover the floor and the walls and the ceiling. They’re thick, larger than any that Shiro has so far seen. They pulse with strange light, the flashes racing outward from one side of the room, from Allura’s bed, from Allura.

She stands beside the bed, one leg on the mattress, like she tried to get out and never made it. Maybe that’s what happened. Her head hangs forward, her hair a tangled mass around her face and shoulders. Her arms hang out from her body at unnatural angles. One of her legs is still on the bed, the other rests against the floor, bent awkwardly, her bare foot twitching.

The plant is—is holding her up. Or— Shiro saw the way it burrowed through the Castle. It has done the same to Allura. He can _see_ the tendrils that drilled into her wrists, moving under the skin of her forearms. A huge cluster disappears into one side of her neck. Thick roots curl up her hanging leg, grounding themselves in her stomach.

There is blood on her nightdress.

Shiro rushes to her, his heart beating a panicked tattoo on his ribs. Navigating the plants is difficult, but at least they take no interest in him. “Princess! Allura!” He does not expect her to reply. He expects that she is… well. He expects the worst.

But she stirs, as he reaches her, unsure what to do, where to start. She makes a soft, wet sound and lifts her head. Alive. She is alive. She is alive and the plant is _burrowing_ into her, and—

And she raises her head enough that he can see her face, the tiny roots that feed into the corner of one of her eyes, the tendrils winding into her nose, her ears, and the underside of her jaw. There is nothing but empty horror in her eyes. She says, mouthing words with no sound behind them, as tears run out of her eyes, “Help me.”

#

Shiro’s hand hums, reacting without conscious control. He grabs the roots that disappear into her throat, and then makes himself stop, even as his muscles bunch, preparing to rip. This thing is _inside_ of her. If he—he has no idea what it’s connected to. He could tear out her heart. He could instigate the spikes, and skewer her from the inside. He could—

He activates his comm, vaguely aware that the others have been yelling in his ear for some time. “I need help, in the Princess’s room. Immediately!”

Allura watches him out of the corner of her eyes. She can’t turn her head to either side. Her pupils are tiny. The pink markings on her face are… wrong. They’re almost gray. Her lips are red and cracked. Bitten. He wonders how long she’s hung here, alone. Trapped. Fed on. Unable to even scream for help.

Shiro tells her, “It’s okay, it’s going to be—it’s okay, we’re going to help you.” Her fingers twitch, her hand held out to one side at an awkward, twisted angle. Shiro swallows and reaches for it, and she clutches spasmodically at his hand, holding on so hard that it hurts, sudden and deep.

He can take the pain. She can break every bone in his hand, if it gets her through this. He repeats, “It’s going to be okay.”

And that is when the others arrive. Shiro knows, because someone screams.

#

“Look, just, just cut through them, cut them off of her,” Lance says, pacing jerkily back and forth behind them, too much panic in his voice to be helpful.

“We can’t,” Shiro says, feeling his pulse in his fingers, as Allura squeezes and squeezes. “You saw what this thing did when you tried to pull it out of the ship. Do you want it to do that to the Princess?” The thought of it is terrible. The spines would split her like a pincushion. Shiro shudders, shoving the thought and accompanying image away.

“Oh, shit,” Lance hisses, and then he lurches out of the room. Shiro hears him throw up.

“So, what,” Hunk says, and he sounds on the edge of being ill as well, “we can’t just—we can’t pull it out either, then? Right?”

“That’s correct,” Coran says, picking his way around the roots on the floor. They all shift towards him, just a little. He’s holding some kind of portable scanner and his expression is locked down tight. He does not look directly at Allura. “Anyway, the lifeform has connected itself to her organs.”

“Why?” Keith demands.

“Energy,” Shiro says, because Allura mouths it, and because he already knows. He watches the pulses of light traveling through this thing, away from Allura, dimming her eyes a little more with each wave. “It’s feeding on her energy.”

“Yes,” Coran confirms, coming to a stop near Shiro. “Exactly.”

“Well, how do we make it stop?” Pidge asks, her voice a shaky thing.

“Million dollar question, Pidge,” Shiro says.

“Right,” she says, and it sounds almost like she’s waking up. “Right.”

“We can’t just experiment,” Hunk says, “This thing is—it could do anything. So how are we going to, I mean. We don’t know enough about this. We need more information. Pidge, we should—” 

“Yes,” Pidge says. “We’ll be—we’ll be back.” He hears them run from the room. He hopes they’ve been struck by sudden inspiration.

“Go help them,” he says, to whoever remains. He can’t bear to look away from Allura’s desperate gaze. He doesn’t want her to feel alone. He can imagine too well the hours she hung here, helpless, forgotten. He shudders.

“You’re losing circulation in that hand,” Coran tells him, after a moment.

Shiro nods. He’s aware. His fingers throb.

Coran clears his throat. “I can stay with her. You can—”

“No,” Shiro says, shaking his head, and not just because Allura’s grip tightened painfully at the suggestion. He can feel the imprint of each of her fingertips between the bones in the back of his hand. The pressure against his knuckles is crushing. But that is alright. He knows how to put pain somewhere else, somewhere it doesn’t touch him. He learned that skill well and fast, it is the one gift the Galra gave him.

He grips her back, as tightly as he can, so she knows he won’t leave. “No, go help the others. I’m going to stay right here.”

Allura mouths, “Thank you.” And his chest aches. He shakes his head, moving the strands of hair that are stuck to her face, brushing away the wetness on her cheeks as best he can.

#

Time passes. Shiro listens to reports from the others, when they think to update him. And he talks, to fill the silence of the room and to disguise the wet, fleshy sounds as the lifeform feeds off of Allura’s body, moving under her skin. He does not know what to talk about—Lance or Hunk would be better suited to this—but the second time he hears a strange squealching sound and sees a root wriggle further into her throat, he finds words.

He tells her about Kerberos, about training for the mission, about the Garrison. He avoids the way the mission ended, not least because he remembers so little of what happened during his time in Galra hands. 

When that conversation does not last long enough, he talks about piloting Black, about what it feels like. He talks about half-baked plans for the war, because if anything will take her mind off of what is happening to her, it will be that.

He even talks a little about Earth, but there is not much he wants to say. He never had very much of a life, there.

His mouth is dry and his throat sore when the others finally return. “Okay,” Pidge says, “we think we’ve got something.”

#

“So, listen,” Hunk says, by way of explanation, “we know its feeding on her, because it really wants to eat, uh, Altean energy, apparently. And she has the most of it, though it keeps trying to grab Coran, too, and—”

“We get it,” Shiro says, because this isn’t—it isn’t helping.

“Right,” Hunk says. “Yes. Of course. Anyway, so, we think the best way to get rid of it is…. Well. To make her give it, basically, the opposite of Altean energy. Something it doesn’t want.”

Something cold runs down the back of Shiro’s neck. He asks, when Allura mouths it, “How?”

“Well, that was a sticking point. But Pidge and I ran a bunch of simulations, and after we disregarded—”

Allura shudders. Something big moves under her skin, over the side of her ribs, and her face twists, as though she is screaming without sound. Shiro shouts, “Tell me how!”

“It’s…” Hunk starts, and then falls quiet.

Pidge says, “You’re not going to like it.”

#

Shiro does not like it.

He likes nothing they say from the time Pidge opens with, “We considered just stopping her heart, but it wouldn’t work. All of our projections showed that the lifeform wouldn’t withdraw quickly enough for us to… bring her back.”

“Right,” Hunk says, steadied by his focus on the task at hand, “plus, it would still be on the Castle, even if our projections were wrong and it somehow worked. It would just come right back for her.”

Allura squeezes her eyes shut as well as she can. Her mouth twists. Her shoulders shake, silently. Shiro shifts, curling his hand around the back of her neck, blocking her so the others cannot see her expression. He says, “Get to the solution, now.”

“Yes, right, of course,” Pidge says. He can picture her fiddling with her glasses. “The solution. It’s. Um. A biological weapon. That we found. That we think will work.”

Shiro considers that. He asks, disbelief creeping into his tone, “We have something designed to kill this thing?” 

Hunk clears his throat. He says, “Um. Not exactly. It’s—well—”

“The Galra used it,” Keith cuts in, spitting out the words, finally. “During their war with the Alteans.” Allura shudders, her eyes cracking open. Her expression is drenched with horror, but it has been for some time. Shiro can’t tell if it’s related to the weapon or not.

Shiro turns the news over, rocks grinding together inside his gut. Any way he looks at it, it feels horrible. He says, just to be sure that he’s following them, “You found a biological weapon designed to kill Alteans. And you want to use it on Allura.”

“We really don’t want to,” Hunk says. “Like. At all. That is not a thing we want to do. But—”

Shiro cuts him off, because the sentence isn’t going anywhere they haven’t been before. He says, “I thought you said stopping her heart wouldn’t work. How is this any different?” It sounds like she’s going to end up dead, either way.

Pidge clears her throat. She sounds miserable when she says, “It’s—the weapon, it, uh, alters the energy of Alteans. It—we think it would be… like poison. Dietarily, I mean. We ran simulations and—and we think the lifeform won’t notice. Until it’s too late.”

Shiro swallows. Everything about this feels wrong. He asks, “Too late for what?”

Keith answers him, the words flat and hard, “Too late to stop feeding before it dies.”

Shiro wishes they’d opened with that. He says, trying to make sure he’s looking at this solution from all angles. “And this doesn’t… it doesn’t kill Allura, too?”

“No,” Hunk says. “I mean. We don’t think so. We modified the dosage to make it work. She won’t—it won’t be enjoyable. But she should live.”

That raises the hair on the back of Shiro’s neck. He can feel things moving beneath Allura’s skin. They’re terrible. They don’t belong. They’re hurting her. He asks, “Should?”

“I’d say we have a 60% chance of success,” Pidge says, the words wrapping like a vice around Shiro’s heart.

Shiro says, staring at Allura’s agonized expression, “That’s not—that’s not great odds.”

“I know,” Pidge says, quiet. “But she will definitely die if we do nothing. And soon. It’s—it’s destroying her organs. We don’t have… we don’t have a lot of time. We have to decide what we’re going to do. Now.”

Shiro shudders. He can’t make this decision. Not with those odds. He asks, studying her expression, “Allura?”

She blinks once, slowly. Something dark moves across the white of one of her eyes, like a tiny snake. She mouths, “Yes.”

“Alright,” Shiro says, the word sour in his mouth. He holds Allura’s gaze, her fingers pressing bone-deep bruises into the back of his hand. “Do it.”

#

They don’t hesitate. Allura doesn’t have the time for it. Coran brings over a syringe, one filled with a strange, glowing liquid. He takes Allura’s other wrist, making a soft, wounded sound when he sees the ruin wrought by the lifeform. “I’m so sorry about this, Princess,” Coran says, somehow finding a vein.

She mouths, “It’s alright,” but Coran does not see. He isn’t looking at her.

Coran says, his voice hoarse, “You might want to step out, lad. Or at least retrieve your hand.”

Allura’s fingers tighten around Shiro’s. Her eyes widen. He says, “No. I’m not going anywhere.” He would have said it, even if Allura had not wanted him to remain so obviously. 

“Listen,” Coran says, leaning closer, lowering his voice, his words a scratchy whisper against Shiro’s ear. “I saw what this weapon does. During the war. You don’t have anything to prove. She already _knows_. She’ll understand. You don’t need—”

Shiro cuts him a look, sharp. “I’m staying right here.”

Coran looks at him for a long, long moment and then nods, stepping back. He says, “Very well. I’m going to the infirmary to get prepared. For you, too. We’ll know if this works shortly. The weapon doesn’t take long to affect us. The rest of you, come with me. You need to monitor the lifeform’s response!”

#

Shiro is stroking Allura’s hair, a moment later, when she trembles, full-bodied. He asks, “Allura?” Her fingers close a little more, and he pulls back enough to look at her face. Her eyes are wide, horrified. The markings on her face are no longer grayish. Neither are they pink. As Shiro watches, black spreads across them, moving from the centers outward.

She flinches, then, and her mouth opens in a silent scream. Her body jerks, seizing, held in place by the creature. Shiro murmurs nonsense words of comfort, his gut aching like someone is digging through the lining of his stomach with a shovel as her breathing goes thin and wild. 

She sags, eventually, wheezing for breath. Her skin has torn, in places, around the lifeform. The shaking ripped her flesh. The result is—terrible. “It’s almost over,” Shiro tells her, praying its true, stroking her hair, her back, her sides. “It’s almost over, sweetheart, I—”

She seizes again, for longer, her eyes rolling back. Shiro grinds his teeth, the pain in his hand is so sharp and bright that he almost can’t feel it. He notices, from the corner of his eyes, that the light pulsing through the lifeform is not so vivid. It is gray now, and growing incrementally darker with each pulse.

Allura makes a wet sound and goes limp once more. Shiro supports her, so her weight does not hang on the terrible lifeform. He can feel her uneven breath against his throat. Her heart pounds out a discordant, stuttering rhythm. She gets a moment of peace, if even that, and then her body jerks again.

He does not allow himself to imagine Alteans dying like this, during the war. He cannot.

The seizures come and go, the brief seconds of time between them growing shorter and shorter, until there is no break at all, until she just shakes in his arms, endlessly. He runs out of words, out of everything, able to do nothing as the smaller roots, the ones at the corners of her eyes and mouth, snap as her head jerks. They do not stretch to hold onto her. They don’t emit thorns. They just… crumble.

The pulses traveling out of the roots are near black. 

And Allura screams, finally. The sound is shredded, loud, agonized. He can see things moving under her skin, writhing. She screams, thrashing, and her fingers tighten around his hand, and he braces, expecting to learn what it feels like when the tiny bones there snap, when his knuckles are crushed. He imagines it will sound like someone stepping on a tooth. He grits his teeth against it, already panting. He can take it. He can. He will _not_ pull away from her.

Her grip goes tighter. He presses his face against her hair, curling his arm around her and holding, determined not to scream. She does not need that memory. Not on top of everything else. Something cracks in the back of his hand, the pressure too great for him to really feel the pain—and then her grip goes limp, all at once.

_She_ goes limp, all at once.

She sags, the blackened lifeform cracking, pieces falling away from her. Shiro cries out, startled. Her eyes are shut. She breathes fast and shallow. Unconscious. She’s finally managed to pass out.

It’s a small mercy, the only one they’ve yet had.

He lifts her, withered roots crumbling away from her, and barks, “Coran, I’m bringing her to the infirmary.”

“Is she…?” Coran asks, anxiety reverberating through his voice.

“She’s breathing,” Shiro says, because he doesn’t know what else to judge. The pink markings on her face are still black. The shattered bone in his hand stabs pain down his arm; he ignores it. He has had worse.

#

Coran waves Shiro over to one of the infirmary beds, just as Allura stirs, her eyes cracking open. She tries to lift one of her hands and gives up with an agonized groan. “Stay still,” Shiro tells her, unsure how much of that lifeform is left under her skin, pressing against her organs or nerves. 

“Shiro?” she asks, her voice a half-strangled rasp. He moves to lower her to the bed, and she makes a terrible, tight sound, fumbling out her hand, managing to grab the front of his shirt on the third try. She says, her eyes going wider, “No! Don’t—” and she breaks off into terrible coughs. Wet, black debris spatters against her lips, brought up from her throat, and she tightens her grip.

“It’s okay,” Shiro says, lying desperately. It will _be_ okay, he has to believe that. “I’m not—I won’t—I’m right here,” he tells her, looking over her head, hoping that Coran has some magical solution to this.

The grim look Coran is wearing says that he does not.

“It’s a good sign, that she’s trying to clear her lungs,” Coran says, sounding like he’s making it up. “Help her sit up.”

Shiro is happy to assist, and if he ends up sitting behind her on the bed, holding her against his chest, well, it seems to stop some of the trembling in her skin, so it is all for the best. Eventually, she goes limp once more, and he tells himself that she is breathing easier. He tucks her head under his chin, wrapping careful arms around her. He can feel things under her skin that shouldn’t be there, strange lumps and bulges. It is—

“Right,” Coran says, standing before them with his arms crossed. “Now for the hard part.”

#

The hard part is… unpleasant, even with Altean medical technology. Shiro did not ever need to see Allura’s skin sliced open, the slow and terrible removal of the dead pieces of the lifeform, or the way they sealed her shut again, afterwards. But he has those images, now. He’s going to have them forever. He can’t bring himself to take Coran up on his offer to leave.

She wanted him there before she passed out.

He won’t leave her alone again.

#

It takes the better part of the day to remove the blackened remnants of the lifeform. The hours are long and gut-churning, but they pass. Allura is left with quickly healing incisions across much of her body, her throat and stomach and wrists a mishmash of scars that Coran says will fade to almost nothing once they put her in a healing chamber.

It seals her off from the rest of the Castle and leaves Shiro with nothing by the agonizing throb of his hand. It has swollen, and turned colors: purple and black. He can see the shape of Allura’s fingertips, where she held onto him with everything she had.

“I should take care of that,” Coran says. “It looks terrible.”

“Hm,” Shiro says, staring absently at the black in his fingers, where the blood has drained downward. The back of his hand is misshapen, even beyond what the swelling would justify. “It’s not so bad.”

#

Hunk comes by while Coran is doing something that seems like magic to Shiro’s hand. He says, “Are you—are you all done? The doors unlocked, so….”

Shiro nods. He feels too tired for words. He isn’t sure how long he’s been awake. It feels like his meal with Allura was weeks ago.

“Great,” Hunk says, staring at Allura, where she sleeps behind glass. “We, uh, we wanted to let you know that it died. The lifeform. We’ve been, um, clearing it out of the Castle.”

“Good,” Shiro manages, ignoring Coran’s grumble of protest when his fingers curl up towards his palm. “You’ll be done by the time Allura wakes up.”

Hunk blinks, his gaze jerked over and landing on Shiro’s hand. The color drains out of his face. He says, “We will?”

“You will,” Shiro confirms, and Hunk nods; he looks almost mesmerized. Shiro bites the side of his tongue, feeling the shards of shattered bone shift under his skin, pulled back into position by the Altean technology.

“Right,” Hunk says. “Of course.”

#

They are done by the time Allura wakes up. Shiro makes sure of it, double and triple checking the Castle to make sure that not even the smallest sprig of the lifeform remains. There are repairs to be done, after they remove the debris. The lifeform tore up walls, ceilings, and floors. The torn material reminds him too much of the way it ripped through Allura’s skin.

Shiro throws his energy into fixing it all, into closing the rifts, healing the damage. He feels… better for it. Less uneasy, at least.

The black fades out of the markings on Allura’s skin, over the following days, but they do not return to their healthy pink hue. They stay grayed. And they are… thinner, than they were. Sharper in the corners. “Will they change back?” Shiro asks, one evening when it’s just he and Coran in the infirmary. “Her markings?”

Coran shrugs. “Perhaps. I never knew anyone who… survived the weapon.” He looks away, the way he always does when talking about the war and all those he lost. “I believe her energy levels are just drained. Maybe they need a jump-start. It’s hard to tell. Altean energy is tied to our magic, so….”

“Mm,” Shiro says, a place-holder noise as he settles in to watch the healing pod for a little while longer.

#

In the end, Allura does not get to wake up on her own. They run into an unexpected Galra patrol, and she is awoken during the battle, something Shiro only becomes aware of when she voice comes over the comms.

“Princess,” Hunk calls, too loud inside their helmets, “you’re awake!”

“I am,” she says, strain in her voice as the Castle’s weapon systems suddenly spring to life. There is no time for more than that, not during the battle, not until they are all back safely on the Castle.

Shiro leaps out of Black, thoughts distracted as he darts past Lance and Pidge. He meets Allura in the hall, and she is—she is steady and whole. Her hair is only in a ponytail, pulled back quickly. She wears the clean shift Coran put her in, after they were done removing the lifeform.

“Allura,” he says, dumbly, fresh relief crashing against him. It was one thing to see her in the healing pod; it is something else to see her walking under her own power, though she looks… concerned. Her markings are gray, still. He barely has time to notice, reaching her in an instant and pulling her into an embrace.

She hesitates, stiffening, and that is enough to cut through the white noise inside his skull. He pulls back, suddenly unsure. “What’s… is something wrong?”

Her mouth is pinched tight. She glances down, sideways, and then the others are swarming around them, interrupting any reply she would have offered. They get swept along to the common room, the moment lost.

Allura does not stick around, once the group settles. She hangs back towards the door and slips away within moments. Shiro watches her go, holding a glass full of some ungodly concoction of Coran’s, and throws back the whole of it before taking a breath and following her.

#

Shiro finds Allura standing outside the door to her room, looking inside. It’s clear of the lifeform. He knows that it is. He checked it a dozen times, making sure that no sign remained of the creature that nearly killed her in her bed.

“Hey,” he says, quietly, before approaching. She is just staring, her head cocked a little to one side. He can see the faint lines of fading scars on the side of her neck. 

She looks over at him jerkily when he speaks, waving her door closed and stepping back, as though she was caught out at something. “Shiro,” she says, looking at him and then abruptly away.

Something turns in his stomach. She’s upset. Upset with him. She has a right to be. If he’d been as thorough as he should have been, if he’d made them investigate the lifeform when it first appeared, none of this would have happened. But he’d been distracted by what he wanted. He says, “Is… how are you?”

She laughs, a little. “Tired,” she says, and then looks guilty.

They stand there, a level of awkwardness between them that Shiro thought they were long past. He doesn’t know what to do with himself. Or how to fix her exhaustion. The way she is looking at him, he does not think an offer to sleep beside him would be well received.

And then inspiration brushes against him. He says, “Hey, come with me?”

She stares at him, just for a moment. And then she cuts an anxious look at her door and something in her expression shifts. She nods. She says, “Alright.”

#

She must know where they’re going before they arrive, but she says nothing. She does not move to take the lead. She follows him, all the way through the winding halls of the Castle, on a trail that Shiro fears he will forget, every step of the way.

But his memory takes them successfully back to the tiny room she showed him, a dozen nightmares ago.

He steps to the side when they reach it, and she moves past him, a dreamy look on her face. She walks into the center of the room and looks up at the ceiling, her shoulders slowly sinking. He can see the moment her breathing settles. He approaches her, carefully, asking, “Better?”

She looks at him, some of the tightness around her eyes eased. He is not used to the new shape of her markings, or their drab grayness. For a breath he thinks she will smile, but her gaze slides down then, and her brows draw together. She says, “I hurt you. Your hand.”

On a list of all the things he expected her to say, he would have ranked that somewhere near the bottom. He blinks, possible replies tumbling through his head. None of them feel right. He settles on, “It was… you didn’t mean it.”

Allura flinches, turning her face away from him. “I knew you did not possess Altean strength. And I still—”

“Allura,” he says, interrupting her, because he cannot take the way her voice cracks. “I’m fine. Look.” He flexes his fingers in and out. He has hurt for far worse reasons. And those wounds have not healed so cleanly.

She shakes her head. “I felt the bones break.”

He does not know what to say. He doubts, looking at her, that telling her she could have broken every bone in his arm and he would not have been angry would help matters. He steps closer, because he does not want her to think he is afraid of her, even subconsciously. He says, “It’s okay.” He brushes his fingers across the back of her hand, and she shivers, her head bent down. 

She asks, her voice strangled, “How can you say that?”

He shrugs. It seems clear to him. He knows from pain. He knows she could break him, if she really wanted to. He knows, and always has, that she doesn’t want to and never will. He says, trying to find some way to put any of that into words, “You didn’t hurt me to hurt me. You just needed something to hold onto.”

Allura makes a quiet, hurt sound, turning her hand in his, palm to palm. She starts, “Coran could have—”

And he says, touching her cheek, trying to get her to look up at him, “I wanted it to be me.”

She does look up then, finally, her eyes wide and startled in the soft light of her hidden room. He swallows, threading their fingers together. “I don’t care if it hurts sometimes,” he says, quiet, “I want to be the one you hold onto.”

And he leans down, slow, giving her time to pull back, if she wants to. She whispers his name, instead, soft and aching, and goes up on her toes. Kissing her undoes the band strapped around his chest, at least for the moment. It eases the tension he’d not even been aware of. He slides his fingers back into her hair, eyes slipping closed when she curls a hand around his shoulder, leaning into him.

The kiss is soft and long, and Shiro leans his forehead against hers, afterwards. He doesn’t want to move. He does not even want to open his eyes, but eventually he does, and startles. 

“What?” Allura asks, pulling back a little, enough to confirm what Shiro thought he saw. “Is something wrong?”

He slides his hand forward, cupping her jaw, his thumb brushing the marking on her cheek. The marks are pink once more, glowing faintly, though they remain sharpened. He thinks the new shape might suit her, anyway. “Nothing,” he says, leaning back down, “nothing at all.”

And, at least in that moment, it is the truth.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I'm on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/andtheblueberrymuffin). I don't bite.


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